Why companies should adopt 100% remote working?
After almost 3 months confined due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us who have had the luck of keep working from home have changed our minds about remote working and what we want and how we feel about.
Context
https://www.hrdive.com/news/workers-adapted-to-covid-19s-new-normal-when-employers-put-them-first-r/579218/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/who-is-happiest-working-from-home-heres-what-latest-jobs-data-says.html
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/as-more-companies-shift-to-remote-work-30-of-workers-say-theyre-less-productive-at-home
If you looked for ‘remote work satisfaction survey’ you would find some more related articles about this topic, where almost all of them talk about the employee positive satisfaction about working from home.
The most important point is the benefit of improving the work-life balance, even we have been confined and we couldn’t make use of all the benefits of working from home. Also, many companies have reported an increase on they key metrics what could be understood as a better productivity from their employees.
On the other hand, we have those people who felt alone or overwhelmed, what makes sense since they have changed their lives completely and some of them are not comfortable working from their place. It’s likely they weren’t comfortable being at their place at all before confinement, but that’s just an opinion..
Benefits
Well, working from home have some benefits for both, the company and the employee.
For instance, the company wouldn’t need to pay for a place for the employee, it wouldn’t need to care about the problems of commuting every day and the delays it can cause, it wouldn’t need to care about meeting rooms anymore (just for 100% remote companies), absenteeism would decrease… within many other benefits.
For the employee the benefits are clear with a better work-life balance, where they can manage their time better, avoiding commuting to the office every day, for those with children they can spend more time with them, pick them up from and take them to school, spend more time to be healthier or for their hobbies… and related to work, they can find a better place to concentrate on their job, they would learn a better way of communication since they would have to avoid non verbal communication, they would manage the hours they feel more productive…
And we cannot forget about our ecosystem, which will appreciate a lot avoiding all that traffic that moves people to their job daily.
Cons
Yes, it also have bad things, but in my humble opinion, most of this bad things are related to what we are used to do.
For instance, communication is not synchronous anymore, so it’s harder to make yourself understand. Also, working environment at offices are not still properly built to have both, people on site and people remote, attending to the same meeting.
Mental health could be also a problem, since social distancing and not distinguishing from where you work and where you live could lead into a some depressive feeling.
At last the most important thing to consider is the team-building problems that this could lead. Having people dispersed into many places could make them not feeling part of a team.
But, these points are just part of a transition, a way of thinking that we have got used to and that will change in the coming times. And this is what makes me think on the next section, which is the why companies MUST adapt remote working.
Why
As far as we’ve seen how companies try to attract talent nowadays, they offer multitude of perks, such as beers at the office, playing rooms, daily fresh fruits, health insurance, flexible working hours (bounding to office hours, start when you want to end when you want), team parties, team building budgets, continuous trainings, etc. Yeah a lot of good things, but almost all of them are related to a on-site working place, to make a better environment for the employee. But, almost every company is offering this perks or a subset of them so far these days.
But, what if I say you that you could have all of them if you just work from home? Yes, you can have a playing room, beers, fresh fruit, flexible working hours… and you even can wake up just 5 minutes before start working if you want!
So, the main reason companies will have to adapt remote working is to be competitive when attracting talent to their companies.
And they will have to adapt fast, because it’s not just about allowing people to work from home, it is also to prepare the whole environment and tools to do this job properly, train people who prefer to work from the office to communicate things to those who are working remote and train employees to use asynchronous tools to communicate.
What I’d say is just not waiting to large corporations to adapt to this remote thing to adapt your company too because maybe it’s too late. If you’re pioneer going remote, then you’ll be on the top of mind of the people to work for you.
There are already companies doing full-remote, but this situation have changed a lot of minds and people have realized that it’s possible for everyone not just for brilliant minds.
- PS: Please, consider this is not a full-objective article, it’s very influenced on the way I think.
- PS2: The scope of this article was not to talk about the process companies should follow to adapt for working remotely, I guess could be a nice article too.